Grants:Programs/Wikimedia Community Fund/Rapid Fund/Web2Cit usability and maintainability enhancements (ID: 23650514)
Applicant details
[edit]- Main Wikimedia username. (required)
Diegodlh
- Organization
N/A
- If you are a group or organization leader, board member, president, executive director, or staff member at any Wikimedia group, affiliate, or Wikimedia Foundation, you are required to self-identify and present all roles. (required)
N/A
- Describe all relevant roles with the name of the group or organization and description of the role. (required)
Main proposal
[edit]- 1. State the title of your proposal. This will also be the Meta-Wiki page title.
Web2Cit usability and maintainability enhancements
- 2. and 3. Proposed start and end dates for the proposal.
2026-02-01 - 2026-05-31
- 4. What is your tech project about, and how do you plan to build the product?
Include the following points in your answer:
- Project goal and problem you solve
- Product strategy or project roadmap
- Technical approach (infrastructure, tech stack, key tools and services)
- Integrations or dependencies (if any)
Project goal and problem you solve
[edit]Citations are a fundamental part of Wikipedia’s verifiability. Citoid is a tool that helps Wikipedia editors insert citations by automatically retrieving citation metadata. However, this doesn’t always work as expected.
Web2Cit is a tool released in 2022 that offers a way to collaboratively fix automatic citations generated by Citoid. It has been widely adopted by users from different Wikipedia communities, some of which have contributed to a growing set of collaborative Web2Cit configurations.
The tool has proven robust and stable, with only two critical bugs reported since its release, both of which were immediately fixed.
During this time, a series of small bug fixes and improvements have been proposed and tracked in Phabricator. Although I managed to address some of them in my free time, most remain open.
In this proposal I plan to work on a selection of these tasks to enhance usability, maintainability and community engagement, some of which have been requested or have been supported by the community.
Product strategy or project roadmap
[edit]A list of selected tasks to work on has been published on Meta-Wiki: [1]
Technical approach (infrastructure, tech stack, key tools and services)
[edit]Web2Cit is composed of multiple parts. You can read more about how these parts work together in our Basics documentation: [2]
Integrations or dependencies (if any)
[edit]Web2Cit uses and extends Citoid-generated citations. It is widely integrated into the Wikimedia Tech environment, including Wikimedia Gitlab, Toolforge, Phabricator and Meta-Wiki.
Its reliance on other third party tools is limited to library dependencies. See long-term maintenance plan below for further details.
- 5. What is the expected impact of your project, and how will you measure success?
Include the following points in your answer:
- Milestones and progress tracking
- Project impact and success metrics
Milestones and progress tracking
[edit]- Have all high priority tasks closed by the end of the project.
- Have at least 50% of low priority tasks closed by the end of the project.
Project impact and success metrics
[edit]- Collaborative configurations:
- Lower the proportion of translation templates without a specific path set.
- Lower the proportion of translation templates without corresponding test, measured by the index proposed in T408861.
- Lower the proportion of invalid translation templates without itemType or title fields.
- Collaborative monitoring:
- Increase average daily pageviews of monitor overview and results pages.
- Increase number of Web2Cit translation summary visits from Web2Cit monitor results.
- New features
- Have at least one translation template using each of the community-requested new features.
- Usage statistics
- Have at least 10 Wikipedia edits with the tag proposed in T321568.
- 6. Who is your target audience, and how have you confirmed there is demand for this project? How did you engage with the Wikimedia community?
Include the following points in your answer:
- Project demand and target audience description
- Links to interaction(s) with Wikimedia community
- Evidence from community consultation such as the [Community Wishlist]
Project demand and target audience description
[edit]The project is aimed at the Web2Cit community of users and contributors. This community has been steadily growing since Web2Cit release in 2022.
Web2Cit won one of 2024 Coolest Tool Awards and its documentation homepage got 7,000 visits since its publication in 2021 (source).
Users
[edit]So far, the Web2Cit user script has been installed by 273 users from different Wikipedias (source), more than half of which correspond to non-English Wikipedia users (source). In addition to these user script installations, Web2Cit has been installed site-wide in 4 Wikipedias (source):
- Azerbaijani: enabled for all users (321645 users/1186 active; source)
- Croatian: enabled for all users (337401 users / 1279 active; source)
- Romanian: available as optional Gadget, enabled by 95 users (10 active; source)
- Turkish: available as optional Gadget, enabled by 54 users (15 active; source)
In sum, the Web2Cit user script is currently used by over 659,000 users, at least 2,541 of whom are active users. This is a huge increase from the 33 installations reported a few months after the initial release (source).
Also, requests to the Web2Cit server have steadily increased since its release, reaching an average of almost 450 daily hits in October 2025 (source). Note these hits not only correspond to requests from Web2Cit user script, but also visits to [3], Web2Cit monitor automated requests and Web2Cit-JSON-editor loads.
Contributors
[edit]To date, 64 editors have collaboratively contributed 2538 edits to 781 Web2Cit configuration files (source), corresponding to 498 websites (source).
Compare this to collaboration in the far more established zotero/translators repository, used by Citoid, in the same period since December 1st 2021. Here, 49 people contributed 670 merged commits resulting in translator updates and 90 new translators. To be fair, it should be noted that one Zotero translator may cover multiple websites, and that having a commit merged into the main branch requires approval from the repository maintainers (as opposed to Web2Cit configurations, that can be edited by anyone).
Other community engagement
[edit]Other forms of community engagement include:
- 43 users have subscribed to Phabricator tasks tagged with Web2Cit or one of its subprojects (source), an increase from the 15 subscriptions reported in 2022 (source).
- 44 people contributed collaborative translations through Translatewiki, making the Web2Cit Server available in 31 languages apart from English, in addition to collaborative translation of documentation pages.
- Community discussions take place in the talk pages of Web2Cit homepage and 29 subpages.
Links to interaction(s) with Wikimedia community & Evidence from community consultation
[edit]The selection of tasks in this proposal is the result of carefully considering my experience as developer and maintainer throughout these years and conversations with users and collaborators in Wikimedia events, including Wikimedia Hackathon 2023 and 2025, Wikimania 2023, discussion pages, email and Phabricator.
Feedback on the tasks that should be prioritized was requested from the community by opening a thread in the Web2Cit talk page. Top 20 contributors (source) where notified on their User talk pages (example), and an email was also sent to the Web2Cit mailing list.
I plan to use the Web2Cit talk page and mailing list to notify the community about this proposal once submitted, and I am open to reconsider some of the tasks in the list based on any additional community feedback received.
- 7. How will your team predict and manage potential user security and privacy risks, and what risks do you currently see?
Include the following points in your answer:
- The level of in-house or consulted security and privacy expertise you will have available to you during delivery of this project
- How your development, testing, and deployment processes mitigate the introduction of unnecessary security or privacy risks
I’m familiar with Wikimedia Foundationprivacy policy,security guidelines for developers, API usage guidelines, Cloud Services terms of use and Recommendations for gadget developers on Wikimedia wikis, and commit to reviewing them if this proposal is approved.
Web2Cit widely uses the Wikimedia Tech ecosystem, with little to no reliance on resources loaded from external sources: we host our code on Wikimedia Gitlab, we run our services from Toolforge, and we save our collaborative configurations on Meta-Wiki.
We do need to fetch and parse external sources for metadata extraction. However, this is handled by our Toolforge service and no requests are sent from the user’s browser, therefore not needing to use Toolforge's anonymizing reverse proxy.
We do rely on loading a third-party library from an external source (json-editor), but we do so via https://cdnjs.toolforge.org/. In fact, one of the tasks considered is meant to integrate this dependency into our code (T408867).
I try my best to consider potential security and privacy concerns in sensitive tasks. See for example T302696 and T305886.
Finally, we don’t collect any personal information or Wikimedia usernames. We do use a custom JSON editor to assist with editing configuration files stored on Meta-Wiki, but changes are not saved directly and the user needs to manually save them instead.
- 8. Who is on your team, and what is your experience?
Include the following points in your answer:
- Your experience as a developer, relevant past projects
- Wikimedia SUL (developer), Gerrit, Github, Gitlab or other relevant public account handles
- Other team members, their roles and expertise
Your experience as a developer, relevant past project
[edit]I am an experienced Wikimedia developer. Some relevant projects include:
- Web2Cit
- Cita Wikidata plugin for Zotero
- Wikipedia Library search user script
- Wikipedia preview bookmarklet
Other projects
Wikimedia SUL (developer), Gerrit, Github, Gitlab or other relevant public account handles
[edit]Wikimedia: User:Diegodlh
- 9. How will the project be maintained long-term?
Include the long-term maintenance plan with maintainer(s) in your answer. If you expect the long-term maintenance to incur expenses, please list those and the plan for long-term expense coverage.
No routine maintenance is expected to be required. Critical bugs, expected to be uncommon, will be addressed by me in my volunteer time.
Web2Cit has originally been developed with support from a Wikimedia Foundation grant. This grant ended in 2022. Since then the tools and services have proved robust and stable, requiring only two interventions to ensure they would continue operating as expected:
In both cases, fixes were simple and they were immediately addressed by me or one of the volunteer developers.
It is also worth noting that since the release of the tool I tried to be as responsive as possible answering user queries in Web2Cit documentation talk pages. See for example [9]
In addition, reliance on external services is low and restricted to the WIkimedia environment, which ensures long-term availability without incurring extra expenses:
- Wikimedia Gitlab for source code hosting.
- Toolforge for running services.
- Meta-Wiki for storing collaborative configuration files, documentation and monitoring results.
- Translatewiki for collaborative translations
- Phabricator for issue tracking
- Citoid for initial metadata extraction
It should also be noted that detailed technical documentation is available, making it easier for other developers to get involved: [10]
- 10. Under what license will your code be released, and how will you ensure the product is well documented?
Include the following points in your answer:
- Code license and compatibility with Wikimedia projects
- Documentation plan
All our code has been and will be released under GPL v3.
All our documentation and collaborative configurations are published on Meta-Wiki under a CC-BY-SA license.
I will make sure that our documentation stays up to date following any changes that result from resolving the tasks listed in this proposal.
It is worth noting that Web2Cit documentation has been highlighted as an example of documentation good practices in MediaWiki’s Tool docs guide.
- 11. Will your project depend on or contribute to third-party tools or services?
As most software projects, this project relies on some external software libraries. However, we don’t rely on loading them from external sources (except json-editor library, which we load through https://cdnjs.toolforge.org/).
Although the project does rely on some external services, all of them are part of the Wikimedia environment, as mentioned in the maintenance-plan section.
We rely on Wikimedia’s Citoid service for metadata extraction, which we extend using collaborative-defined configurations.
- 12. Is there anything else you’d like to share about your project? (optional)
Budget
[edit]- 13. Upload your budget for this proposal or indicate the link to it. (required)
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1iqvT69QskJsJ4M5eq_6UIfartCE1h3KdNXk7ff-BAIg/edit?usp=sharing
- 14. and 15. What is the amount you are requesting for this proposal? Please provide the amount in your local currency. (required)
7285600 ARS
- 16. Convert the amount requested into USD using the Oanda converter. This is done only to help you assess the USD equivalent of the requested amount. Your request should be between 500 - 5,000 USD.
5000 USD
- By submitting your proposal/funding request you confirm that you have read and agree to the Application Privacy Statement, WMF Friendly Space Policy, and the Universal Code of Conduct.
Yes
Endorsements and Feedback
[edit]Please add endorsements and feedback to the grant discussion page only. Endorsements added here will be removed automatically.
Community members are invited to share meaningful feedback on the proposal and include reasons why they endorse the proposal. Consider the following:
- Stating why the proposal is important for the communities involved and why they think the strategies chosen will achieve the results that are expected.
- Highlighting any aspects they think are particularly well developed: for instance, the strategies and activities proposed, the levels of community engagement, outreach to underrepresented groups, addressing knowledge gaps, partnerships, the overall budget and learning and evaluation section of the proposal, etc.
- Highlighting if the proposal focuses on any interesting research, learning or innovation, etc. Also if it builds on learning from past proposals developed by the individual or organization, or other Wikimedia communities.
- Analyzing if the proposal is going to contribute in any way to important developments around specific Wikimedia projects or Movement Strategy.
- Analysing if the proposal is coherent in terms of the objectives, strategies, budget, and expected results (metrics).
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